


The Mirror

by songforawhale (lyreann)



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Original Work
Genre: Gen, Revisionist Fairy Tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26796961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyreann/pseuds/songforawhale
Summary: A shield. A weapon for her destruction. A mirror.
Kudos: 3





	The Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> I chose Ovid's version of the origin story of Medusa as my source material, as it works best for the narrative I want to tell. There's mention of rape but no graphic description.
> 
> Medusa has been, and probably always will be one of the characters that fascinate me the most. Of course this is actually more of a story about myself rather than really about Medusa. Almost feeling a bit nervous and uncertain posting something like this for the first time, but it's been most satisfying writing this story for me, and I hope you'd enjoy reading it as well :)

A shield. A weapon for her destruction. A mirror.

She lingers, for long, in front of that reflexive surface which holds a power of materialization. It materializes a world in which maybe she is still a living thing, whereas in the one it reflects, she hasn’t been considered as such since a long, long time ago.

But something is stopping her from looking into it just yet. Perhaps, it’s because she, better than anyone else, knows the power the eyes hold.

When she first walked onto the dry land, leaving behind the halls and corridors decorated by agate, emerald and obsidian of her father’s, men watched her with wonder. ‘What an astonishingly fair one!’ Said they, when she walked up the shores, ‘especially the splendor of her hair. Have you seen any other beauty that surpasses what she possesses?’

They celebrated her beauty as if she were a new born goddess. But they looked at her and around her there was no radiance so stunning as to be fearful, so they knew that she was one of them. It was true that, although she came from a bloodline of the most ancient divinity, she was the only mortal child among her siblings.

So she walked among the mortals. She dined with them, and prayed with them. She was happy to be welcomed, and find her place on their lands. Her elder sisters, Stheno and Euryale, though, had never understood her activities of mingling with the ordinary men and women. And Keto, her mother, with an ancient instinct bound by blood, always held a sorrow for her child.

‘I worry that your fate will be a sad one,’ said she, ‘for you are mortal.’

And so fate fell on her. It started with one of the Olympian usurpers, Poseidon, who took the sea from her father Phorkys the day the reign of the Titans ended with the thunders of the Olympian gods. New orders were established. She’d heard of it, but didn’t think too much of what it had to do with her, for her place was with the mortals already. She was ignorant.

How ignorant she was! Had she but known that the new ruler of the sea would be laying eyes on her. But even her primordial forefathers couldn’t have shielded her from the pursuit of the new king. He seized her in the temple of Athena. The expressionless statue of the goddess watched them in silence. Under the acquiescence of the grey-eyed goddess, he impaled her.

She was crying. She was screaming. She remembered the pain, but not as clearly as the eyes of the one who was inflicting it. The eyes of the ocean god themselves were an unbounded body of waters, inside which she was trapped, with the deepest trenches of perils, the bottomless abysses and the salty water filling them in waves and waves without even seemingly dropping a little bit.

But the scariest part was that he was swallowing her without even realizing he was doing it. He was looking at her, and there was not a bit of her in his eyes. She was inundated, her existence reduced, and diminished to nothingness. So she came to understand, she wasn’t alive after all.

And so, she must not see the world in alive forms. Her hair was turned to serpents, and any creatures she looked at would be turned to stone. They said her punishment was just and well-earned, for it was sentenced by the goddess of wisdom herself.

She was wandering around, in fury and dementia. Everything she saw looked vague and blurry, and everything she looked at was turned to stone. A priest praying to his gods, a slave girl carrying a water jug (it clashed on the ground when her scream of terror was cut out), a kid playing on the street now had his arm stretched out mid-air in eternity. Men, woman, dogs, birds, trees, every living thing.

Everything became silent, stiff and motionless. Until at last she was alone. She realized now she was alone, surrounded by the wrecks and ruins she brought about.

Devastated, she sat down by a fountain, her sullen look reflected in the water.

She did not know a young student, the only survivor of this act of destruction, who was studying philosophy and art at the public school, had approached her, until she heard the sound of his sandals when he was almost right behind her.

‘No! Please, don’t move your head.’

She suddenly had an unspeakable fear that, in a way she did not know yet, he would cause her gravest harm. So she did not move her head, and sat very still, with her back stiffened like a stone.

‘Please, come.’ Said the young student.

He took her hand, and she was very compliant. Maybe the young man wasn’t even thinking about how helpless he was, and the monster, knowing how fragile and powerless he was in front of her destructive force, indulged and followed him.

Slowly, she stood up under his lead, and so did her reflection in the water. Now they stood side by side in front of the fountain. Her eyes kept looking down, while the young student’s eyes were fixed on her image in the mirror. He let go of her hand.

‘I must have terrified you.’ Said she.

But the young student said:

’You are lovely.’

He did feel immobilized, not out of horror, but rather fascination. _What tempestuous loveliness of terror she is!_ The young student thought to himself. So ghastly, so abominable, yet such grace!

It was true, in spite of all the curling and flowing of the vipers, of an appalling image of death and torture, she was still astonishingly beautiful. She was so beautiful that she was inhuman. She was so inhuman that you thought she couldn’t be killed, such monstrosity. She couldn’t have been mortal. Yet she had been! And she still was…

Their eyes met each other in the mirror…They were looking at each other. He saw her, an emblem of both beauty and terror. And she saw him. He was a handsome young man, gorgeous like an olive tree.

Then something happened. He still had that look of wonder, but his face stiffened, every line chiseled. He looked at her as if he wanted to praise her, and he probably was going to, as he slightly parted his lips, but those fresh lips, too, turned rigid and cold, and unspoken words were now forever hanging at the back of his tongue of stone, locked, lost.

It took her a while to realize what it was that just happened. Their reflections were rippled away, distorted and deformed. The mirror broke.

At last it was decided that it had been too troublesome. They couldn’t keep letting her turn the world into wastelands. It was Athena, who, after having denounced and sentenced her crime, for the first time appeared to her.

‘This madness of yours stops now, Medusa.’ Said she.

What have I done to you? What have I done to you? She wanted to scream out loud, and confront her, but the goddess of wisdom had hidden her eyes behind her aegis, and Medusa was crouching on the ground, shivering, hiding her face in the stone cold, hardness of Mother Gaia’s caress.

It was a strange combination of anger and shame she felt. She was resentful, and rightfully so. There was no reason for her to feel ashamed, for it was not a punishment just and well-earned.

She wished she were as fierce and forceful as her sister Stheno.

She was exiled to the islands called Gorgades far away from the land, along with her sisters, who had always shared a contempt towards the Olympian gods, and never cared much about the mortals anyway.

For some reason she did not fully understand, Athena left something behind on the islands. A shield. A shield of bronze so polished that it reflected. It was left on the highest cliff among the islands, and once in a while when the sky was not so bulged with grey clouds that the light of the sun god could fall through, they could see by looking up that the shield was so radiant as if it were shining on its own. She wondered what it meant, if that was a warning that Athena would always be watching over her.

_That, my dear,_ a voice said to her, _is a weapon that would bring your destruction._

Her sisters quickly learned not to look at her. It turned out, even the primordial blood of the Titans could not resist her stare. A giant once looked at her face and he was now a huge mountain standing at the edge of the sea. His arms and shoulders became ridges, and his beard and hair woods and trees.

There was no woods, nor trees on the islands they resided, nor any living things aside from the three of them, although some poets might argue that, they were so ghastly that they were not beings of this world. All there were on the islands were stones. Stones of the animals once occupied there, and of the men who by fate’s sacrifice were sent there, and dared to spy upon the face of the monster.

She spent most of her time inside a cave, a cave so deep and dark that she needed not worry she accidentally stared at her sisters, too. They brought food of fish and sea weeds to her twice a day. The islands were barren and desolate, but the seas and oceans were always generous to their children.

And the sisters would sit with her at the end of the cave. ‘Do you remember father’s halls?’ Euryale spoke with a dreamlike voice, so distant almost reverberating and echoing, which disturbed the snakes a little bit. Medusa couldn’t forget the bellowing cries her sister let out the day they learned what the gods had done to her. There was a time before the rising of the Olympians. ‘I wish to kill them all,’ said Stheno, _and all the filthy mortals they claimed to cherish_. Stheno had always been the most ferocious among them.

They did also just sit there, silently. The only sound left were the rustling of the scales when the snakes twisted their bodies onto each other, and the hissing when they protruded their tongues out. The Gorgons. The three sisters. In the ultimate darkness. A darkness so rich and abundant that it really blinded you, and swallowed you whole.

And then, there was no Stheno, nor Euryale, nor Medusa. Not anymore. They were back when they were still in the womb of Keto, curling up inside the warmth, when Keto herself hadn’t emerged yet from the chthonic blood of Gaia, when they were all inside each other within the embodiment called Chaos, before the world itself was even born. All boundaries dissolved. All existence diminished. All reflections disappeared. All that left was the darkness, and so was all that ever was.

‘My sister,’ one day Euryale said to her, ‘keep in mind that it is our choice to stand with you, and that is all the excuse Athena needs to punish us.’

She knew, and sometimes it was enough to console her. But there was also a grief inside her that was inconsolable. She grew agitated and ravenous, although she did not know exactly what she was craving for.

Sometimes at the dead of the night, she would crawl out of her cave when her sisters were soundly asleep, when the whole world was asleep as if it were dead. It was as if only then, it was able to accept her deathly observation at last. _It is safer for me,_ it whispered, _as it is safer for you._

She would walk to the shores of pebbles and gravels, and breathe the amniotic salinity in the air. The water gently crashed against the islands in rhythmic waves like it was tamed by the night, and it touched her feet with a coldness more piercing than stone. It was so quiet that even the vipers of her hair stopped twisting and scuffling for a while; they stretched and coiled their slimy, lethargic bodies, and in this serenity of absurdly strangeness, finally came to rest on the nape of her neck.

Somewhere very, very far away, in the distance where the night sky thrusted into the ocean water again, sporadic lights were blinking through the mist, shimmering, shivering ominously. It was no lights of the living — the islands were located at the end of the world. It was the territory of the vile and the wicked. No sailor would be crossing this part of the sea should they still wish to return to their lands, and no hero would be finding their quest here of the destiny they were after — maybe, except, that a monster was here, waiting for them to kill.

Maybe that was the lights of her kinds, she thought, one of her siblings even. A sea monster lurking in the deep dark blue, with their luring lights drifting in the shallow water, to prey on any unfortunate soul miserable enough to get lost here. They would never find their way out.

And through the mist a lugubrious song of nocturnal creatures arose, a sound of anguished cries, a threnody of this indefinite desolation, dreary enough to drive any alive, sensible beings, to craziness. _We will be here forever, we will be here forever!_ It cried. Above all the crying and shimmering, though, were the ethereal lights of the constellations, hang by the gods themselves in the clear dark sky, shining and rotating perpetually.

Surrounding her was a world traversing in its hypnogogic states. Not wakeful enough to flee away from her, nor was it in such deep slumber that it enclosed all the enchantments in its unknown, unconscious dreams. It was ignorant of her existence, and in being so, escaped the fate of being turned to a dead thing by her slaughtering eyes. But she knew there was no position of her in that world. She peeked the reflections from a pellucid wall which was her incarceration by a gaze, night after night only for a glimpse of ephemeral. It was beautiful, and ugly, and she hated it.

She knew it when fate was closing in on her. A Nereid, sent by Keto, brought them the news. _There was a young man on a the island of Seriphos, and he swore to bring the king the head of the infamous Medusa._ The Nereid was covering her face with her hands when she was telling the story to Stheno and Euryale, as if the gaze of Medusa was contagious, and she was gone as soon as she finished.

‘That sounds like a foolish oath.’ Said Medusa, when they sat together in the cave, and Euryale told her what the Nereid had said.

‘He is the son of Zeus.’

She wanted to laugh. Of course! How could she not have foreseen it? Athena would probably assist him herself. He must have all the aids he needs, and he must fulfill the destiny of the hero he is meant to be.

‘We would fight him, though, and all of the gods who’d help him.’ Said Stheno.

‘Yes, we would.’ Medusa replied, simply.

But she is just the sacrifice in a ritual, another monster to be killed, and even if it is not her, there will be another.

_We’ve been here long before they were even born, and they’ve been slaying us ever since. This has become our story now._

‘I need to take a walk.’ Medusa said, and left.

Her sister doesn’t know what to do, but she is quite sure of it. It is the only sensible solution, so much so that it feels insane and ridiculous. But the idea of it, is so dangerously delicious, and tempting. The more she thinks of it, the more she knows that this is what she’s been meant to do all the time without knowing it. Why has she delayed for so long?

She climbs the highest cliff on the islands.

Athena’s shield, so polished that you can see your own reflection in it. The weapon for my destruction, which I have come to understand now, is essentially a mirror.

I think abut the power the eyes hold.

I know what will happen, kind of. Maybe I’m not so sure as I thought I’d be, because there’s still room for it all to be my wishful thinking. The sake of storytelling, that I must be a monster that can be killed and that I must be killed by the hero so he finds his wholeness, so do all the men who look up to him. Fate’s mockery for my audacity, for I dare to challenge. He laughs at my arrogance and foolishness.

But it’s something I’m willing to take.

I wonder what I will find in those windows of my eyes that all living creations have not peered into. The end of exile as the end of being. A soulless monster that is no human and never has been, a frightening emptiness emanated from a hole of nothingness, an inner darkness rooted so deeply within the reality which has always been concealed under the veil of illusion and been avoided by turning their heads, and once revealed, will be so devastating as to petrify. So I wonder, or something else?

I wonder what I would see.

I look into the mirror.


End file.
